Unreal City

...Writers &Writing UNREAL CITY BY PEARL K BELL Urban existence in the second half of the 20th century, becoming daily more dirty, deprived, uncomfortable, expensive, and menacing, has few articulate celebrants Rare indeed is the writer who will now praise famous cities without apology or embarrassment, without misrepresenting their reality in the service of metaphor Today, most authors turn to bromides, like the idea (hardly as new as its adherents claim) that cities are evil, unnatural, and deadly, that only small towns and rural backwaters allow a human being to be intimate with neighbors and Nature (always capitalized) Or, contrarily, they offer the slum romance—city life seen as the raw slice of human appetite, the world of the junkie, pimp, hipster, gangster Neither of these imaginary places allows for ordinary people One man's response to both images is Soft City (Dutton, 229 pp , $7 50), a small and provocative book by Jonathan Raban, a young English literary critic A minister's son who grew up in a Hampshire village, Raban is fiercely defensive about London, where he has lived for three years, and he takes the kind of aggressive pride in his adopted home that only sensitive young newcomers trom the constricting provinces can feel for a great metropolitan capital (It is no accident that the New Yorker was founded by a newspaperman from Colorado ) Surviving the treacherous multifariousness of the city, in Raban's opinion, is the mark ot adulthood For, he argues, "Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, ot style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living ' Soft City is not a sociological study, though Raban's thinking has been significantly influenced by the work ol George Simmel and Robert Paik The author gives short shrift to such pioneers of green-belt planning as Ebenezer Howard and Lewis Mumtord, at the same time, he finds Le Corbusier's contrasting plan for the Ville Radieuse repellent, because it stems from "a savage contempt for the city and an arrogant desire to refashion human society into almost any shape other than the one we have at present " Utopian reformers, busily drafting their urban-renewal plans with coldly technical logic, are to Raban a dangerous threat to the reality that fascinates him the city in all its scummy diversity and soot-laden landomness He calls the city "soft" because "it awaits the imprint of an identity invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can five in " Raban's inquiry into the nature of citizenship—the odd blend of stamina, imagination, flair, and eccentricity demanded ot people who successfully adapt to the metropolitan labyrintn—is an evocative mixture ot autobiography, anthropology, personal reminiscence, and literary analysis, and he is especially cogent and suggestive on 19th-century students of the city like Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens Pierce Egan, Fnednch Engels, and Charles Booth In the bold chapter "The City as Melodrama," Raban contends that personal identity in an urban setting is endlessly open to the exercise of the will and the imagination," leading the inhabitants to engage m chronic impersonation Hence the inordinate importance of style in the city—the acting out of fantasy through clothes, houses, assumed accents, cars Immigrants, whether greenhorns from another country or refugees from the provinces, are suddenly forced to cope with " a society on which you are called to impose your choice, rather than a society which imposes its historical and customary order upon you " Raban largely ignores the extent to which so many of these newcomers are brutally crushed (as Thomas and Zuaniecki showed in The Polish Peasant), yet he is brilliant on the way surface appearance becomes the crucial means ot standing out in a world of strangers And he suggests that since the city is not a "normal" environment, since "its public arenas are licensed tor a degree of theatrical abnormality," it offers special opportunities and rewards to criminals, eccentrics and fanatics Moreover, Raban is particularly shrewd and amusing on the middle-class liberal citizens who assume that a blunt style ot chic, unostentatious austerity renders them antibourgeois and nonconformist In their avid commitment to the scrubbed, natural, unvarnished, expensively sedate style ot bare-wood furniture and muted simplicity, which they equate with Otwelhan honesty of principle, these "new frontiersmen" seem to be disengaging themselves from the frenetic tempos ot city living But, in Raban's mocking view, far from renouncing style, they betray only another, peculiarly contemporary stylistic device for urban survival Moving into dilapidated neighborhoods with buckets ot white paint and Japanese bubble lamps, they drive out the old working-class residents and vastly inflate property values Their possessions, their "plain" cars and houses, are "called on to play the parts of ideas, to express the ideologies of their owners" Despite their claims, they remain willing slaves to the imperatives of fashion Computer dating, spiritualism, Krishna Consciousness, ecology, odd little clubs like the Muswell Hill Humanists and the South Place Ethical Society—all these typically cosmopolitan forms of communion strongly refute Mumford's idea that the city is the natural habitat of rational man On the contrary, says Raban, "the city I live in is one where hobos and loners are thoroughly representative of the place, where superstition thrives, and where people often have to live by reading the signs and surfaces of their environment and interpreting them in terms of private, near-magical codes" The city seduces one into magical habits of mind, a primitive dependency on boundaries, limits, taboos, on following propitiatory routes to market and subway, on the tahsmamc prestige ot certain •good-address" postal districts Here, however, as in his proudly affectionate account of his own London quarter, scrofulous Earl's Court, a continually shitting urban quicksand of polyglot mobility, of seedy birds of passage, Raban's incurable literanness about the city —the necessarily limited viewpoint of the free-lance writer, with neither fixed routine nor job—as well as his youth, his lack of material and family ties, his immigrant s status, lead him to overlook or neglect as much as he attends to For example, because Soft City is primarily a literary conception of urban living, locked into the gaudy shocks of extreme metaphors, Raban is unconvincing in his brash disdam for Boston and its ancillary town-lets This curiously untypical American metropolis doesn't lend itself to the extravagant generalizations appropriate to London and New York, and consequently Raban dismisses it as dull and suffocating, "a great sluggardly, anomalous Peter Pan ot a place, which has preferred never to grow up " Of course it doesn't have quite the menacing, theatrical excitement of London and New York, the mad size and diversity contained in a cultural capital, but neither is it the collection of retarded 18th-century villages that Raban crankily describes ri M Jack home in London, he is on firmer intellectual ground More than new traffic systems or urban-renewal programs or architectural Utopias, he declares, we need to understand the "nature of citizenship," how the self and the city must become imaginatively related to each other As a New Yorker born and bred, though now living elsewhere, I am delighted by his heady zest for urban lite, his ardent response to its variety and possibility, its anonymity and freedom from curiosity and censure, its inexhaustible capacity for surprise Yet I am disappointed, too Raban's image is entirely one of isolates and eccentrics, of drifters and expatriates His city landscape is a writer's heightened and operatic world of gangsters, frauds, pitchmen, and exhibitionists It is a young man's literary vision, charming but unreal Where, in this metaphoric London, with its echo of Eliot's "unreal city,/ Under the brown tog of a winter dawn," is the metropolis of families, of children, of work and predictable necessity, even of boredom and dull routine'' Where is the city of natural birth to put beside Raban's city of violent death...

...For urban streets are filled not only with a Dickensian gallery of pushy grotesques, but also with baby carriages and pull-toys, with straggling lines of schoolchildren on their way to museums and candy stores, with harassed middle-aged housewives pushing loaded carts home from the stores, with a sober variety ot very ordinary people going about their very ordinary business—with the life of midafternoon as well as midnight...